October 18, 2016 AT 8:26 am

A little while back we updated some firmware on one of our ESP8266 modules. Well now we’ve only gone and bought about twenty of them off ebay – and they all need updating!

While it’s possible to do this with a usb-to-serial device and pull wires out and plug them in again in a little breadboard, it’s also pretty time-consuming. And a bit fiddly.

And when real-life work gets in the way of nerding about, time-consuming and fiddly means more time working and less time nerding. Which means we needed something to make re-programming all these ESP8266 modules that little bit quicker. So we came up with this:

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering" - Freeman Dyson